Techno

The releases always seem to speed up this time of year, as anticipated artist albums finally clear their lead times, and labels scramble to get out the last singles before the winter slow-down. With more great recordings swelling my promo playlists than I know what to do with them, there's nothing to do but get right down to it, with reviews of five singles and four albums that should all help illuminate the lengthening nights.

Tom Demac: "Long Way Down" [Four Twenty]This is the first time I've heard anything from the Welsh producer Tom Demac, but "Long Way Down" is one hell of an introduction. (Previous records have appeared on Factor City, Sthlmaudio, Hypercolour, and his own Electronique Audio.)

Structurally and even sonically, the track is fairly indistinguishable from any among however many dozens of big-room tunes of the month; his loping, grinding rhythm, heavy on scraping sheet-metal and bursts of white noise, owes plenty to Radio Slave's sense of groove and texture, and the track develops according to well-worn tricks of pacing, rolling out a one-bar percussion loop and then telescoping a sense of proportion by dropping other elements every four bars, 16 bars, etc. (You can learn a lot about house and techno by listening to the way tracks develop: contrast Robert Hood's truncated loops, minimal to the extreme at four to the bar, to the easy pace suggested by Stimming's "Kleine Nachtmusik", which uses a 16-bar chord change to stretch out into a long arc. One suggests the sensory battle of the perpetual now; the other a perpetually receding horizon.)

I don't mean to slam Demac-- dance music is all about recycling tropes, and he does it with considerable skill. What really makes the track stand out, though, is the vocal: run through an evil-sounding pitch shifter, the voice takes on the garbled timbres of The Chipmunks Present Tuvan Throat-Singing Classics. It's bizarreness is matched only by the sense of melancholy as the voice plunges into the depths, and overtones peel away like dead petals.

Mario Masullo and Gltches: "Varonegroove"/"Spin that Shit" [Pimps Ride Free]Italy's Mario Masullo and Glitches inaugurated their new label with a study in contrasts. On the one hand you had one of the silliest label names ever-- "Pimps Ride Free," really?-- and on the other, two fantastic cuts of sensuous, adventurous techno and house. For catalog number two, we're stuck with the PFR name, but who's complaining, as the new music is even better. "Varonegroove" kicks off with the rippling congas familiar from acts like Anthony Collins, Guillaume and the Coutu Dumonts, or Johnny D, but it soon develops into a great, cloudlike shape of massing arpeggios, splitting the trance difference between Border Community and Donato Dozzy. It's good, but "Spin that Shit", on the flip, is the real deal: ten-plus minutes of nonstop percussive grooves, crafty bass work, wordless refrains, and eccentric synth soloing. Its closest reference point is to Luciano at his hyperkinetic best, as on the Live at Weetamix CD, and hearing Masullo and Glitches pick up the torch and run with it is exceptionally satisfying.

Orlando Voorn: Balanced: Troubleshooter [Mixtape]Proper minimalism, this: tribal, tumbling percussion-- wood, glass, plastic, metal-- hammered over and over and over. Phrases have no discernible beginning or end; instead, filters yawn and faders creep up and down, so that at any given moment, a new sound is coming into earshot and another is crawling back into shadow. Odd accents lend the A-side an unstable funk born of hard-edged syncopations; an understated kick drum leaves the impression of a wide, arid patch of earth suffering mutely beneath the hailstorm. (The B-side mix, with more tonal percussion and a fuller kick, sounds slightly more conventional-- a techno churn in the vein of Radio Slave, Marcel Dettmann or Paul Brtschitsch.) While it's far cleaner in sound, something about the A-side's roiled intensity reminds me a little of Surgeon and Vice's 1997 Creep EP, and also of some of the Sandwell District label's output, in particular CH-Signal Laboratories (8003 Lucerne)'s Hypnotica Scale EP. With the kick/tick/clap/tick template all but ubiquitous in new post-minimal, it's refreshing to hear artists trying out different cadences.

Cio D'Or & Paul Brtschitsch: "Safran" [Broque]Here's a team for you: Cio D'Or, responsible for fine, bleepy, experimental-leaning techno for labels like Treibstoff and Motoguzzi, and Paul Brtschitsch, a Berlin techno veteran known most recently for releases on Ostgut, Rootknox and Wolfskuil, as well as Mobilee, where he recently co-produced Anja Schneider's Beyond the Valley. D'Or has long shown an affinity for the unspooling loops of early Sähko records, and Brtschitsch is an old hand at the clattering, cavernous Berghain sound, so it's no surprise to find that this track from the Aroma EP is a chugging, rolling monster bathed in reverb and battered by insistent, syncopated chords; what is surprising is the way that open-ended synthesizer riffs blossom out of it all, like orchids from asphalt. "Kukurma" is a more muted affair, with a base of humming refrigerators opening up into a melody reminiscent of early-90s Black Dog Productions; "Ginger" takes the same melody and replants it in a thicket of soundtrack strings, swollen tympani and errant blips-- just the kind of beatless, nominally ambient track that more records would do well to include in an era of oonce-oonce ennui.

Je Dávu: "Zebra (Raw Meat Techno Edit)" [Platzhirsch Ltd.]Dance music's real lowest common denominator-- and by low, I'm talking about frequencies-- the tried-and-true 4/4 kick drum has been shouldering a lot of the burden lately, with virtually every record on the market suffused with a huge, booming kick as powerful as a squat thruster's thighs. Nothing wrong with that-- it sounds kick-ass and adds so much heft that, tuned properly, the track might not even need a bass line. But it's good to change things up as well, if only because the kick sounds all the more devastating when it finally hits. (Consider how Patrice Bäumel's kick-less "Roar" carves out a space of unremitting tension when mixed into a club set.)

On this one-sided (and purple! and sparkly!) single for Platzhirsch, Je Dávu, aka Amsterdam's Melon, whips up a twister of toms and hand drums, with the filters in slow, constant motion; for the first few minutes, they're supported by the thinnest, flattest bass drum you've ever heard, until BOOM!-- and in comes the piledriver, for a while, before letting up for a lunch break and finally returning for a last bout of seismic punishment. I keep telling myself I shouldn't like this as much as I do. There's nothing to it, really, and to be honest, it sounds like your average loop-techno DJ playing with the filters on his mixer. I wouldn't be surprised if it were knocked out in one night. But I'm a sucker for drama, and this unabashed tool has it in spades.

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Dinky: May Be Later [Vakant]Alejandra Iglesias released her debut album in 2003, for Carpark, but that now seems like something of a false start; she would quickly drop the synth-pop influences, just as she dropped the "Miss" from her original alias, "Miss Dinky." Since relocating from New York to Berlin and re-introducing herself on a first-name basis, Dinky has developed her style across a number of releases for Cocoon, Crosstown Rebels, and her own Horizontal label, but it's fair to say that this ambitious album for Vakant really sees her coming into her own. The influence of her fellow Chileans is here in the off-kilter rhythms and psychedelic sound design; when she strips down to a metallic, percussive base, her music bears some resemblance to Bruno Pronsato's clangy, abstracted funk. (On "Mars Cello", these elements come together in a particularly engrossing way.) Dinky often seems torn between a will to jack and a desire to dream: fast or slow, her rhythms are uniformly down-and-dirty, but her sound field often disintegrates into a spray of dissolving samples and oblique details. That tension, however, is precisely what makes her music so rewarding.

Damián Schwartz: The Party Lovers [Net28]You could trace the trendlines of the last few years of European house and techno by following the career of Madrid's Damián Schwartz. A year or two ago he was crafting stripped-down, paranoid minimal techno in obvious debt to Minus; now, in 2008, the year of Our Lady of House Music, Schwartz has relaxed his rhythms and opened up his sound. But with results this good, I could care less about capacity on the bandwagon.

Schwartz has always had a knack for efficient rhythms and condensed tonal energy. His tracks often feel like kernels about to break open from inside, and so they do here, swollen with soulful vocal snippets and acid-tinged basslines. Schwartz isn't too shy about his cribbings; many tracks feature Chicago-inspired pianos and wildpitch string ostinatos, and one of the best tracks,"Lo Que Sube Baja", cuts up weirdly accented vocals in a way reminiscent of Villalobos. The Mole's hypnotic disco and Osborne's freestyle inspirations both color the margins here. But in crossing the hallmarks of vintage minimal techno with traces of house at its most jubilantly universal, Schwartz has managed to put his own stamp upon the music. And perhaps more important than its originality is its quality, which is here in evident abundance.

Andy Stott: Unknown Exception (Selected Tracks Vol. 1) [Modern Love]The Manchester label Modern Love-- home to artists like Pendle Coven, MLZ and Claro Intelecto-- has moved gradually, since its foundation in 2002, from a dusty and desiccated sort of post-electro to a deeper, dubbier sound that connects directly back to Basic Channel's minimalist dub techno. Andy Stott is one of Modern Love's anchor tenants, and perhaps appropriately, his music often seems to hew as much to the in-house style as it does to any more individual signature. Dub and Detroit are the watchwords on this collection of singles, and there's not much guesswork to them: invariably, they're led by a groaningly deep sub-bass line; minor-key chords, swathed in reverb, lend an aquatic atmosphere. In his best tracks, like "She's Gone Wrong", knife-point hi-hats prick like perforating lasers. And when he comes across the right sound, as on "Fine Metallic Dollar", it's truly brain-melting. What makes Stott's work so engrossing is its sense of space and proportion: even the simplest, one-chord dub mantra opens up into a vast, palatial chamber carved of solid marble and trimmed in pewter. Put this on in the background and let it simmer; you'll be surprised how often it comes to a boil.

Stefan Goldmann: "Ptolemaic Drift" [Macro]Few producers have a career that looks quite like that of Stefan Goldmann, who got his start recording lush, decentered house music for Classic before spreading his strange, proto-post-minimal seed across labels as diverse as Jesse Rose's Front Room, Josh Wink's Ovum and Dixon and Âme's Innervisions-- not to mention having put out one of the best singles in Perlon's entire catalog. Appropriately, no one else has a sound quite like his either. All the tracks on the first disc of The Transitory State already appeared as singles-- mostly on Goldmann and Finn Johannsen's Macro label, though all three tracks from the 2005 Perlon CD are here, rather miraculously.

But it's a joy to have them collected in one place on CD, if for no other reason than that these tracks deserve to find more listeners, including the kinds who don't buy vinyl or even, necessarily, go clubbing. Goldmann's vision of house music doesn't deny the hunger for motion: his rhythms, banged out on well-tuned drum machines-- no glitches, no funny stuff here-- bump and swing with panache. But he's equally skilled in the realms of melody, harmony and timbre. Where so much current house seems content to splash a drum track with an augmented chord or two and call it "deep," Goldmann works his tracks around more unusual sounds and riffs, whether it's the Dopplering trombone of "Lunatic Fringe", the electric bass and violin counterpoints of "Radiant Grace", or the creepy circus organs of "Aurora" and "Sleepy Hollow".

Disc Two, meanwhile, is a totally different beast: an hour of droning synthesizer experiments and muffled musique concrete that wouldn't know a drum beat if it hit them over the head, offering a pure and heady listening experience. (It also works surprisingly well as background music for writing.) The ambient disc's material is also available as Voices of the Dead, a beautifully packaged box set of five seven-inch singles (limited to 500 copies) that should find its way to the top of many electronic-music nerds' Xmas lists this year. Finally, stay tuned for the February release of Goldmann's debut mix CD, for Japan's Mule Musiq label. Gathering cuts from the likes of Mathew Jonson, Minilogue and Carsten Jost, and including several absolutely ginormous tracks, expertly mixed-- Villalobos' "What You Say Is More than I Can Say", Petre Inspirescu's "Sakadat", Plastikman's vintage "Hypokondriak"-- it's a definitive statement of spice-rubbed post-minimal house and techno, and probably the most satisfying mix CD I've heard this year.